Tuesday, November 06, 2018

sonabatque proinde inter
guttur et pectus ejus, quaedam harmonia mirabilis, quam nemo mortalium vel
intelligere posset, vel aliquibus artificiis imitari. Solam flexibilitatem
musicae et tonos ille ejus cantus habebat; verba vero melodiae, ut ita dicam,
si tamen verba dici possunt, incomprehensibiliter
concrepabant. Nulla interim de ore ejus vel naso vox vel anhelitus spiritalis
exibat, sed inter solum pectus et guttur harmonia vocis angelicae
resonabat. [Then a wondrous harmony sounded between her throat and her breast
which no mortal man could understand nor could it be imitated by an artificial
instrument. Her song had not only the pliancy and tones of music but also the
words—if thus I might call them—sounded together incomprehensibly. The voice or
spiritual breath, however, did not come out of her mouth or nose, but a harmony
of the angelic voice resounded only from between the breast and the throat.]

In this
third stage of Christina’s astonishing activity, the sounding of wondrous
harmony from her quieted body corresponds to the state of the lover in the
mental sphere where “love expresses itself as complete resignation to the will of the Beloved.”[1] In this state, while still subject
to the abyss of duality separating lover and beloved, “selfishness is utterly
wiped out and there is a far more abundant
release of love in its pure form.”[2] The increased purity of love
in the mental sphere is seen in the fact that here “only about one-fourth of
the original lust of the gross sphere remains, but it remains in a latent form
without any expression . . . not . . .
even subtle expression.”[3] Here one is free from the “possessive longing . . . which is
typical of the lover in the subtle sphere.”[4]

To clarify the continuing synthesis
of love and action in this third stage of the saint’s movement, listen to the resonance
between its renunciative musical release and the three criteria of true action defined
above (specularity, intelligence, musicality). First, Christina’s sounding is specular in the sense of being a reflection of something deeply
beyond-within herself, just as the voice, conveying the verbo-musical image of
divine intelligence, reflects the specularity of angelic being: “The angel is
an image of God. He is a manifestation of the hidden light. He is a mirror.”[5] She sounds as mirror of the angel, who is mirror of
God, and thus in the act of reflection the selfsame mirror. The wonder of this harmony
is not simply a matter of her becoming its medium, but of the medium of her
body and spirit unfolding into being what is communicated. Such is the moment
of sounding, of her limbs singing all of a sudden from the depths of their own stillness:
membris omnibus quiescebat sonabatque
proinde . . . [she became quiet in all her limbs and hence there sounded .
. .] Likewise, action is not only grounded in the agent’s need for
self-disclosure, but in the necessity of spontaneously discovering that one
indeed already is—as per the Nietzschean imperative to become what you are—whatever one’s action is seeking. As Dante
says in the Convivio, “chi pinge
figura, / se non può esser lei, non la può porre” [he who paints a form, if he
cannot become this form, cannot portray it].[6] And this means not knowing or surrendering all ideas
as to what you are, following the whim of the universal dialectic whose
movement is the essential activity of creation or the universe: “‘Who am I?’ .
. . ‘I am God’.”[7] As Nietzsche says, “To become what one is, one must
not have the faintest notion what one
is.”[8] God is the name of the unknown one who is the only answer
to the question of itself. “There was a man. That man had no name, for that man
is God.”[9]

Second,
the act of Christina’s sounding is intelligent
in the sense of being a freeing of itself from itself. As “all life is an
effort to attain freedom from self-created entanglement,”[10] so is the wondrous harmony an effect of letting-go
the effort which brings it forth, a loosening of involvement with her own
members. Everyone is familiar, in one way or another, with the interpenetration
of attainment and surrender, the arrival of striving into its inverse which
forms the moment of fulfillment. Or as Dante’s Virgil explains, “Questa
montagna è tale, / che sempre al cominciar di sotto è grave; / e quant’ om più
va sù, e men fa male. / Però, quand' ella ti parrà soave / tanto, che sù andar
ti fia leggero / com’ a seconda giù andar per nave, / allor sarai al fin d’esto
sentiero” [This mountain is such that it is ever more difficult at the bottom,
at the beginning; and the further up one goes, the less it gives pain. Thus,
when it shall seem so easy to you that going up will be like floating downstream
in a boat, then you will be at the end of this path].[11] Intelligent action proceeds through imitation and
habituation only to arrive into the inimitable and spontaneous.

Third,
Christina’s sounding is musical, not only aesthetically, but by virtue of being
a beautifully unbounded release of the formless into form, as per Meher Baba’s
definition of the only thing ultimately worth doing: “To penetrate into the essence
of all being and significance and to release the fragrance of that inner
attainment for the guidance and benefit of others, by expressing, in the world
of forms, truth, love, purity and beauty—this is the sole game which has
intrinsic and absolute worth. All other happenings, incidents and attainments
in themselves can have no lasting importance."[12] Similarly, the saint’s
spinning appears literally to drill into that transcendently immanent depth of
another world (this one), secreting thereby not so much some thing—and not not a thing seeing as we still
talking about it—as the openly secret truth of its own reverberating presence.
So true action results, not only in concrete results (objects and services) but
in something seminally unforecloseable, “the beatitude . . . of a potentiality
that comes only after the act, of matter that does not remain beneath the form,
but surrounds it with a halo.”[13] Likewise in the sphere of
political action, what “the State cannot tolerate in any way” is not the
protest of fixed identities, but “singularities form[ing] a community without
affirming an identity,”[14] in other words, the shared action
of persons who are exhausted of themselves, who refuse the separative or
non-non-dual form of identity on which political parties are founded and which
makes individualism and collectivism equally intolerable.[15]

In sum, the third phase of
Christina’s spinning shows forth the circular
nature of action as search (circle,
circus, search, fr. PIE *kikro,
‘to turn, bend’), the shape of its place within the universal gravity of this whole
cosmic carnival which moves us “sì como rota ch’ igualmente è mossa, / l’Amor
che move il sole e l’altre stele” [like a wheel being moved evenly, by the Love
that moves the sun and the other stars].[16] And whom do you seek? “Every creature
in the world is seeking happiness, and man is no exception. Seemingly man sets
his heart on many kinds of things, but all that he desires or undertakes is for
the sake of happiness.”[17] But happiness is not a thing,
it is a being. “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” (Luke 24:5). And being
is a verb, a spontaneously breathing kind of musical word. “I’ mi son un che,
quando / Amor mi spira, noto, e a quel modo / ch’e’ ditta dentro vo
significando” [I in myself am one who, when Love breathes within me, take note,
and to that measure which he dictates within, I go signifying].[18] Something born without whence
or whither. “The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but
you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with everyone born
of the Spirit” (John 3:8). A sounding and a hearing—that which each other is of.
So Christina’s song, the music of an amorously panting spiritual breath [anhelitus spiritualis], like that of the
Psalmist’s panting hart—“As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul
pants for you, my God” (Psalm 42:1)—releases the essential fragrance of action
as the search for its own source, a finding found in the exhaustion of agency,
as per the beautiful Indian fable of the Katsuri-mriga or musk deer:

Once, while roaming about and frolicking among hills and dales,
the Kasturi-mriga was suddenly aware of an exquisitely
beautiful scent, the like of which it had never known. The scent stirred the
inner depths of its soul so profoundly that it determined to find its
source. So keen was its longing that notwithstanding the severity of cold
or the intensity of scorching heat, by day as well as by night, it carried on
its desperate search for the source of the sweet scent. It knew no fear or hesitation
but undaunted went on its elusive search until, at last, happening to lose its
foothold on a cliff, it had a precipitous fall resulting in a fatal injury.
While breathing its last the deer found that the scent which had ravished its
heart and inspired all these efforts came from its own navel. This last moment
of the deer’s life was its happiest, and there was on its face inexpressible
peace.[19]

Where are
you going? If there is one thing I want the remainder of this commentary to
achieve it is the abolition of achievement, the erasure of the entire illusory
realm of determinable results. Life, reality, everything, whatever you want to
call it, is infinite and anything which has the nature of an intended result,
other than that infinity itself, is in the end only another dead end or
stepping stone to something new. In the end (and beginning and middle) one simply
attends forever to this unlimited tendency:

since that which human nature seeks and toward which it tends, whether
it moves in the right or the wrong direction, is infinite and not to be
comprehended by any creature, it necessarily follows that its quest is unending
and that therefore it moves forever. And yet although its search is unending,
by some miraculous means it finds what it is seeking for: and again it does not
find it, for it cannot be found.[20]

There is no
escaping the inconsequentiality of consequences, no permanent not laying down
the endless burden of requiring results. “There can be no realisation of
Infinity through the pursuit of a never-ending series of consequences. Those
who aim at sure and definite results . . . have an eternal burden on their
minds.”[21] Eventually the inexpressible
peace of falling into finding that there is nothing outside of oneself to seek
simply takes over—the divinely fatal destiny of a most glorious futility, one
which renders all efforts worthlessly worth it: “Man cannot escape his glorious
destiny of Self-realization, and no amount of suffering that he passes through
on the way to it can ever be too much.”[22]

In
the breathless sonic outcome of the saint’s desperate spinning I hear a form of
oppositionless protest song against the presumption of results, a music refusing via
surrender whatever forms of will would claim to force themselves into reality.
As “love and coercion can never go together,”[23] Christina’s harmony embodies
the canticum cordis or “song of the
heart [which] cannot be forced,” [24] whose unforceable power goes
on sighing and singing regardless of outcomes and before whose faith the
intellect, eventually “so staggered by the vastness still beyond it that it
will be forced to admit the hopelessness of its quest,” [25] is finally constrained
without coercion to bend. As Klima says, “But what the mind does not believe,
the heart does. And in the end the intellect does, too; what else is left for
it to do?”[26] And Bataille: “the human
being arrives at the threshold: there he must throw himself headlong [vivant] into that which has no
foundation and has no head.”[27] And Leopardi: “What is life?
The journey of a crippled and sick man walking with a heavy load on his back up
steep mountains and through wild, rugged, arduous places, in snow, ice, rain,
wind, burning sun, for many days without ever resting night and day to end at a
precipice or ditch, in which inevitably he falls.”[28] Everyone
surrenders—you already have. It is too late ever to have not. Far too
light-speedily late even to have ever been!

Headlessly
singing straight through the heart, Christina’s uncanny instrumentality speaks
the horizon where surrender and expression converge in a manner pointing theory
and practice into the hopeless necessity of their shared freedom from
consequentiality. Here we hear with ears cut off from our noisy mass
hallucination of mastery over, or condescending supposition of determination
of, results. Yes, results follow and do not follow acts, but the only kind of action
which does not ruin either is one that constantly says no to, that never stops
letting itself go into letting go of, their eternal burden. “I never make
plans, never change plans,” said Meher Baba, “It is all one endless plan of
making people know that there is no plan.”[29] Like the final happiest
moment of a life fearlessly wasted in search for itself—all the time.

Inimitability

What is this sound which cannot be imitated (imitari), this definitely indefinite quaedam harmonia mirabilis coming from
the saint’s body? How does its know-not-what quality correspond with the nature
of action as it moves according to the spectrum of love through the gross,
subtle, and mental spheres? The answer to these questions lies in the unitive
convergence of state, place, and experience in the process of love-ordered
action, a convergence which in turn discloses the nature of inimitability as
the spontaneous intersection or fusion of these categories. The inimitable wondrous
harmony of true action is just this, phenomenologically not some supernatural
sound, but the musical synthesis manifesting where one’s state, one’s place,
and one’s experience converge without reduction, opening via each other into
higher unities. “There was not a single star left, and I married every one of
them with greatest spiritual pleasure. Then I married the moons.”[30] Here in the moment of movement’s fulfillment—as glimpsed in the purity of a
gesture or peak experience wherein the separative boundaries of self, body, and
world are broken down without obliteration—there is found that intensive self-sufficient
oneness which fulfills Augustine’s definition of music: “the science of moving
well, such that the movement is desired for itself and because of this delights
through itself alone” [scientiam bene movendi; ita ut motus per se ipse
appetatur, atque ob hoc per se ipse delectet].[31] This is why “music alone gives
definite answers,”[32] because it per se echoes the infinite
unclosed definiteness of divine reality, the natural truth, knowledge, and
bliss of the one who perfectly is its
own free activity (actus purus), just
as “the just man serves neither God nor creatures, for he is free, and the
closer he is to justice, the closer he is to freedom, and the more he is
freedom itself.”[33]

Music
per se—definitely not just any music! Here inimitability is not a problem of deficient
skill, not a question of potentiality. Everyone knows how to be crucified or spin
as well as anyone else. What potentiality does not do (don’t go there) is do it the way the one who does it like that does (Christ-ina). Meaning that the
inimitable concerns this utterly as if too-ready-made aspect of a being whose
experience is its place and state,
whose state is his experience and
place, whose place is her state and
experience. “O marvel! a garden amidst fires! / My heart has become capable of
every form.”[34]
Now we are back in that most mystical sphere of potentiality, not doing what
you can do (activity), nor not doing what you can do (impotentiality), nor
doing what you cannot do (miracle), nor not doing what you cannot do (stasis),
but something more astonishingly inimitable and bewilderingly simpler than all
of these: doing what you cannot do by not
doing it.[35]
Singing what I cannot sing by not singing it.

Meher
Baba explains how places, states, and experiences are “interlinked in the gross
world as well on the inner planes.”[36] In the physical realm,
the distinction and relation between the categories is clear in the way a
“change of place brings . . . a change in the state of mind and both of these
result in a change in the nature of experience felt.”[37] On the inner planes (i.e.
where the soul identifies with its subtle or mental body and is consequently
aware of subtle and mental worlds), the boundaries become less discernable but
remain, as intimated in dreams “where the place, mental state, and experience
with which a person is confronted . . . do not have the same externality or
separateness which characterize them in wakefulness.”[38] Similarly, “in the divine
hallucinations of the subtle planes, as well as in the spiritual nightmare of
the mental plane, there is a growing tendency towards fusion of the experiences
which are normally separated from each other in gross wakefulness.”[39] But on the seventh plane
of self-realization, where the soul “now knows itself through itself and not
through the mind,”[40] “the integral fusion . .
. is so complete that there we cannot have any places, states or experiences.
Life there is lived only in its indivisibility.”[41] Integrity of place,
state, and experience is of the nature of Reality, just as purpose (there being
somewhere to go and something to achieve) is of the nature of illusion:

Purpose presumes direction and
since Existence, being everything and everywhere, cannot have any direction,
directions must always be in nothing and lead nowhere. Hence to have a purpose
is to create a false goal. Love alone is devoid of all purpose and a spark of
Divine Love sets fire to all purposes. The
Goal of Life in Creation is to arrive at purposelessness, which is the state of
Reality.[42]

Arrival at purposelessness coincides with realization
of the indivisibility of place, state, and experience, the erasure of their
imaginary relationality, the reflective vectors through which the whole
shifting mirage of goals make its appearance
on the life-horizon of inherently purposeless reality. The relative separation of
places, states, and experiences familiar within the material domain is actually
a product of imagination. For it is precisely through the imagination of places
and states that mind experiences its own experience: “Mind is subject to
imagination. It imagines and experiences imagination through places and states
which imagination creates . . . Just as in the gross world there are places,
states, and experiences, there are imaginary places, states and experiences on
the subtle and mental planes. Yet in both cases they belong to the illusion
created by imagination.”[43] The imaginary nature of
experience via imagination of places and states is clear, for example, when you
see an image and conceive of it as being there,
the object of your subjective experience, when in fact it is no more there than
not. A dark room is not black, and not not, and so on.

Now consider
how thoroughly one’s sense of purpose and attachment to results—the whole field
of thinking and feeling that someone, individually and/or collectively, is
going somewhere and getting things done (or not)—is entangled with the mutual
contingency of place, state, and experience as opposed to their integral
fusion. Everywhere we are bound in thinking that the achievement of one
requires or results from the other, perpetually forgetting the immanent reality
of their unity, alienating one from the other exactly so as to maintain the
illusion of control over and/or culpability for results, in contradiction to
the ancient common sense: “You have a right to your actions, but never to your
actions’ fruits. Act for the action’s sake. And do not be attached to inaction.
. . . The wise man lets go of all results, whether good or bad, and is focused
on the action alone.”[44] Imagine Christina taking
credit for her inimitable harmony or being disappointed if it did not sound!
Imagine whatever the hell you want, anything you think has the power to make
you happy or unhappy! In reality no one really cares how things turn out the
way they think or claim to. One is simply watching the whole thing, bound by
identification with a largely self-created drama without which you would
seemingly have no place, state, or experience, nothing to be and nowhere to go.
“As a witness, the soul remains aloof from all events in time, and the results
of actions do not bind it. All this has to be experienced and not merely
thought of.”[45]
Because no one really knows what to do—because one really does nothing:

As Soul, it does nothing, it merely IS. When the
mind is added on to the soul, it appears to think. When the subtle body is
added onto the soul with the mind, it appears to desire. When the gross body is
added onto all these, the soul appears to be engaged in actions. The belief
that the soul is doing anything is a false belief.[46]

Bodies (material, subtle, mental)—all move and feel
and think like puppets of a master who never lifts a finger. Seeing that, how
much labor, work, action is actually grounded in the fear of doing nothing, of one’s
identity with purposeless existence, of being a soul who merely is? How much
investment in results is really the perverse confessional performance of this essential
inability to plan anything properly speaking? How much so-called responsible
action is simply the illusion it maintains for itself? The fact is, as Meher
Baba explained during the Fiery Free Life, “intellectual planning turns out to
be a planning mostly in name, containing in it only as much truth as is
necessary to justify the players in feeling that they have had a real share in
the entire game.”[47] Nothing works
out—everything.

Our
mass hallucination of mastery over and/or slavish dependency upon results may
be termed the great human or ME peace plan—a plan placing oneself in the middle
of everything by permanently insisting on conjoining these irreconcilable
principles, as illustrated in an anecdote about a man who visited Meher Baba in
1937:

“Now tell me, what do you really want?”

The man answered, “I want to serve my country, but a
disappointment in a sad love affair frustrated my plans. I want to fulfill my
plans and have peace of mind.”

“Plans and peace! These two can never go hand in hand.
Where there is peace, there is no plan; and where there are plans, there is
[turmoil]. Either give up plans and have peace, or have your ‘plans’ and give
up thoughts of peace. You can’t have both. That is impossible. People suffer
because they want the impossible, the unattainable! You want to stand in the
fire and at the same time do not want it to burn you. You want to build a house
in a graveyard!”

In actuality—“you will know them by their fruits”
(Matthew 7:16)—this plan turns out to be only the cover its own shadow, the
non-plan of its own endless plan B, which is to fret over things going or not
going your way, to remain lifelessly living in the burning graveyard of
reserving rights to results. I have a reservation! That is, the great ME peace
plan is in truth the means of the opposite of both, the bad spontaneity of a
status quo where inner and outer turmoil—worry and war—are maintained as
ever-present indispensable immediate options. Such is the plan whose diurnal
installation results in the self-destructive world of all-too-imitable action—the
omni-result which it is precisely never too late not to produce: “Anything you
look forward to will destroy you, as it already has.”[48]

Here
the inimitability of Christina’s harmonic spinning throws ME full circle into a
horrifying—and hopefully for that reason most happy—intuition: that the “savage
torpor”[49] of the human sphere of inharmonious
activity, the world which fails to fulfill true action’s three criteria (specularity,
intelligence, musicality), is the direct result of one’s own personal misuse of action per se, a misuse which is the
intimate opposite of the saint’s hyper-useful whirling. For, as Vernon Howard
has explained, the nature of false action is to generate not wondrous harmony
but a distracting noise within and without oneself, not the repose of surrender
but the perpetuation of movement for its own sake, and not insight but
intentional blindness to action’s essential nature. [click for AUDIO]

It is called action
without intelligence. It is called action without understanding. It is called
action for the sake of creating a whirr in the mind, a noise, a vibration, so
that you don’t have to see, you don’t have to see what you don’t want to see
about yourself. And let me tell you, as if you don’t already suspect it, let me
tell you that the world is hurtling forward with unintelligent, destructive
action for the sake of action alone, and no wonder that it is in the condition
that it is in. . . . And everybody in their shallowness praises
movement!—political, religious, educational, social, in the family: Let’s do something, let’s go somewhere,
let’s act—as if action is salvation instead it is ruination. Where are you
going to find one human being, where are you going to find one man or woman who
will say, Just a minute! What are you
talking about, praising physical, mental, emotional movement as if it is a
virtue in itself? I will repeat the question: where are you going to find
someone who will question it? Nobody wants to question it, because if they did,
they would have to give up their foolishness, they would have to give up their
pretense. And do you believe what I am going to tell you next? They would have
to give up their self-destructive hurtling downhill. The cry, the wail of the
human mind is: Give me something to do so
that I won’t have to think intelligently about what I am doing. Give me
something that has a lot of bells to it, a lot of trumpets, a lot of noise, a
lot of headlines, a lot of racket. Now let me ask those of you right here
now, and watching and listening to this, would you have the courage to begin to
slow down your life, so that you can begin to question where you are going and
what are you are doing? So that eventually something would come to you that you
can see as clearly as you can see the sky, clearly see that you have been
moving along without any thought at all about where you are going.[50]

[15] “In social life the
recognition of the spiritual infinity of the Truth will mean a challenge to
individualism as well as to collectivism. It initiates a new way of thinking in
terms of an indivisible totality and it discards all the relative values
of comparison in favour of the recognition of the intrinsic worth of
everything” (Meher Baba, Discourses,
I.171). “Political parties are organisations that are publicly and officially
designed for the purpose of killing in all souls the sense of truth and of
justice” (Simone Weil, On the Abolition of All Political Parties, trans.
Simon Leys [New York: NYRB, 2013], 16). Note in this respect how the scene of
Christina’s spinning, a repeated occurrence among the nuns at St. Catherine’s
near St. Trond, is at once individual and collective. In togetherness, her
ecstasy is both singularly her own and as shared, the ecstasy of each. “The
height of selflessness is the beginning of the feeling of oneness with all. In
the state of liberation there is neither selfishness nor selflessness in the
ordinary sense, but both of these are taken up and merged into the feeling of selfness
for all” (Meher Baba, Discourses, I.31). After the harmonious
sounding subsides, Christina was “restored to her former self” and “rose up
like one who is drunk,” calling the nuns to her who “greatly rejoiced in
Christina’s solace,” after which they all sing the Te Deum laudamus
together (Life, 61). The movement of musical, transpersonal
participation via a ‘felling of selfness for all’ is completed when the saint,
the subjective center of all the activity, only “knew what had happened from
the tales of others” (Life, 63).

[16] Dante, Paradiso, 33.142-5

[17] Meher Baba, Discourses, III.160.

[18] Dante, Purgatorio, 24.52-4.

[19] Meher Baba, Discourses, II.193.

[20] Eriugena, Periphyseon, PL 122:919, translation cited from Bernard McGinn, The Growth of Mysticism: Gregory the Great
through the 12th Century (New York: Crossroad, 1994), 118.

[21] Meher Baba, Discourses, I.133.

[22] Meher Baba, Life At Its Best, 50.

[23] Meher Baba, Discourses, I.24.

[24]
Joyce L. Irwin, “The
Mystical Music of Jean Gerson,” Early
Music History 1 (1981): 196.

[35] “Where potentiality is the power
to do something, and impotentiality is the power to positively not do
something, like the active silence of someone who can but wills not to speak,
apotentiality here means more than a lack of power but a power as it were more
powerful in its lack, a third form of potentiality altogether: the power to do
something at once without the power to do it and without the doing of it,
without act. If doing what one properly cannot, what is impossible, connotes a
miracle, this positively inactive apotentiality is a species of negative
miraculousness, the mystery of doing what you cannot by not doing it. Where
freedom or the ability to do as one wills is ‘to be found in the abyss of
potentiality’ and ‘is […] to be capable of one’s own impotentiality’, mystical
sorrow points to a freedom beyond freedom, a freedom free of its own free will,
a freedom free of itself that is freedom” (Nicola Masciandaro, On the Darkness of the Will [Milan:
Mimesis, 2018], 53).

[36] Meher Baba, Beams on the Spiritual Panorama, 83.

[37] Meher Baba, Beams on the Spiritual Panorama, 84.

[38] Meher Baba, Beams on the Spiritual Panorama, 85.

[39] Meher Baba, Beams on the Spiritual Panorama, 85-6.

[40] Meher Baba, Discourses, II.172.

[41] Meher Baba, Beams on the Spiritual Panorama, 86.

[42] Meher Baba, The Everything and the Nothing, 62.

[43] Meher Baba, Beams on the Spiritual Panorama, 86.

[44]Bhagavad Gita, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Three Rivers, 2000),
2.47. 50. Cf. “One must try sincerely to do his duties, but results must always
be left to God. Worrying about the results is not good; it’s of no use. If one
wishes to do anything for others, one must do it sincerely, and having done it,
should not worry about the results. For results are not in human hands. It is
for humans to do, but for God to ordain. It is not difficult, but men don't
try. Just because it is human nature to think about the results doesn't mean
one should worry about them. One may think, but must not worry” (Meher Baba,
quoted in Lord Meher, 1599).

[45] Meher Baba, Discourses, II.157.

[46] Meher Baba, Discourses, III.146.

[47] “Without beginning and without
end, the caravan of evolutionary creation marches on from the Immeasurable to
the Immeasurable. Most persons on the way get caught up in the transient
immediate, and evolve by conscious or unconscious reactions to it. Some can
detach themselves from the transient immediate. But since their detachment is
only intellectual, they enjoy freedom only in the realm of the limited
intellect, which now tries to comprehend the past, or anticipate the future, as
best as is allowed by the limitations under which it works. They try to shape
the present in the light of their knowledge of history, as well as in the light
of their insight into the possibilities for the unborn future. But the limited
intellect is not competent to grasp quantities which are beginningless as well
as endless, with the result that the purely intellectual perspective, even at its
best, inevitably remains only partial, sketchy, incomplete and, in a sense,
even erroneous. The intellectual perspective is workable, and even
indispensable, for planned action. But in the absence of the deeper wisdom of
the heart or the clearer intuition of the spirit, such intellectual perspective
gives only relative truth, which bears upon itself the stamp of uncertainty.
The so-called planned action of the intellect has behind it many mighty forces
which have not even come to the fringe of consciousness; and it also actually
leads to many valuable unexpected results which are entirely beyond the range
of vision of the so-called planning. In other words, intellectual planning
turns out to be a planning mostly in name, containing in it only as much truth
as is necessary to justify the players in feeling that they have had a real
share in the entire game” (Meher Baba, Lord
Meher, 3193-4).

Saturday, September 29, 2018

I like villains, heroes, angels, devils —
anyone who acts their parts perfectly!

– Meher Baba

If I start
laughing during a take, it’s almost like a guarantee that it’s going to be in
the movie. [Laughs]

– Panos Cosmatos

Mandy’s
vengeful victory over evil—as if there is or ever need be such a victory, a victory
over nothing—is grounded in the power of laughter, that inexplicable capacity
of consciousness or the soul to exult in joyful sovereignty and spiritual
freedom over whatever, to become the yes
of a total NO to anything. Spontaneously—for no reason at all. To laugh in the
face of … everything, oneself, in the face of God—becoming God. I am your God now.

THAT [laughing at myself]
is exactly what Jeremiah Sand cannot or fatally fails to do. Named after the ‘weeping
prophet’, he is a primo example of the permanently sad and ever sadder separative
ego-self as trapped in its own hallucinatory dereliction. “I AM the man that
hath seen affliction by the rod of his wrath. He hath led me, and brought me
into darkness, but not into light. Surely against me is he turned; he turneth
his hand against me all the day” (Lamentations 3:1-3). Sand is an identity simply
too special, too much of a face and
appearance and form for himself to ever be laughed at, much less by himself. So
the end of the day he is not special at all—save in a moment of invisible
self-recognition, gazing at into the fire Mandy’s burning body—but just another
depressive super sickie or ‘Jesus-freak’ living out his days in an auto-repetitive
mirror-state of alienation from reality from which he ‘saves’ himself by
imagining it as his own divinity. Alienation, being abandoned by
Truth/God/Reality, being other than himself, is his illusory God-himself, his wearisome
trip, with all the unoriginal trappings of a hippie-consumerist parody of
natural deoessence or absolute individuality. Accordingly, Mandy Bloom’s
laughter, the flowering laughter of a being worthy of love (amanda), sends Jeremiah immediately back
to the mirror, desperately seeking security in the certainty of the
impossibility of self-doubt. If you believe in yourself, you will believe
anything!

Laughter is what makes
Mandy’s murder a martyrdom, what makes her not only a victim but a witness to
something that sees through the “crazy evil” which kills her (and can only kill
upon being seen through), as if realizing the spontaneous power of the wind or
spirt which blows across the embers of her own bones and scatters the ashes of
her skull in Red’s hands. To laugh in the face of evil is to see through evil,
to perceive its transparency, its insubstantial shadowiness, its nothingness.
Is that it? You made this song? Yes. I
did. And it’s about you? Yes. It is. [LAUGHING]. Supreme auto-affection of
a fiction. “Tra l’erba e ’ fior venìa la mala striscia, / volgendo ad ora ad or
la testa, e ’l dosso / leccando come bestia che si liscia” (Dante, Purgatorio, 8.100-2) [Among the grass
and the flowers came the evil slither, now and again turning its head and
licking its back like a beast that smooths itself]. Seeing Mandy’s lovely
laughter I am tempted to translate it into the kind of divine critique of human
religion we hear in Amos 5: 21-4: “I hate, I despise your religious festivals; your
assemblies are a stench to me. Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain
offerings, I will not accept them . . . Away with the noise of your songs! I
will not listen to the music of your harps. But let justice roll on like a
river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!” I hate your whole phony, religious,
phonographic self! But the laughter is more and beyond that, something more
perfectly carried away with itself. Yes, the saint could always have followed
instructions, performed the demanded sacrifice, and extended her life. But how
much better, how much more FUN not to, to find by seeing through evil, this so
darkly seeming thickener—I see the reaper
fast approaching—something better than its opposite, something unspeakable
which sees and cuts through everything. “And suddenly she saw it coming towards
her with the eyes of her soul, more clearly than can be seen with the eyes of
the body, and as it approached her it moved like a sickle” (Angela of Foligno, Memorial). Hearing this pivotal laughter echo
backwards and forwards through the film, we see that the question of humor and
comedy is there all along, from Red’s starless expression in the helicopter as musically
glossed with King Crimson’s “Old friend charity / Cruel twisted smile / And the
smile signals emptiness for me” to his final weirdly comic gaze at Mandy’s
spectral presence in his car.

Between that initial non-smile
(and weirdly proto-smiling non-non-smile) and his final hyper-smile (and weirdly
astonished mad grimace), there are several conspicuous jokes, all rather
nonsensical and anti-witty except for Brother Swan’s about the “porker” they
offer to the Black Skulls: That is such a
good idea. That lard-ass, he couldn’t find his nose in a mirror (again the
mirror, anticipating Jeremiah’s begging of his own image what to do; also note
how the image of porker is given a virtual role in the vengeance by
Caruthers:It cut through bone like a fat kid through cake). Red’s humor is
nonsense, but in two different keys, descending and ascending, separated by the
absurdly irrelevant relevance of what he sees, in exhausted shock, in the
random mirror of television (Cheddar Goblin, Emergency Broadcasting System). Before
Mandy’s death, his jokes (Erik Estrada,
Galactus) breathe the contrary comic-melancholic air of his saturnine
temperament (What's yours? Um...Saturn,
probably. Yeah? Saturn’s pretty cool), the atmosphere of a man of sorrows
making jokes which achieve laughter only by playfully ridiculing humor itself.
After Mandy’s death, in devil-may-care vengeance mode, Red’s ‘jokes’ acquire
the power of a divine or sovereign absurdity, becoming spontaneous movements of
his soul achieving instant recovery from and victory over his situation: Ah! That was my favorite shirt. Ah! You have
a death wish. I-I don’t want... I don’t want to talk about that. You’re a
vicious snowflake. Now nonsense has become the logic of victory and
vengeance itself, the opposite of defeated, world-weary therapeutized consciousness
and at the same time the perfect expression of a heart who has experienced, through
and against itself, the agony of the worst defeat: “This is the greatest pain:
to see your love suffer” (Julian of Norwich, Showings).

Opened thus by “the
tainted blade of the pale knight, straight from the abyssal lair,” Red becomes
capable of swimming the mystic sea of hell and despair in which Jeremiah is
drowning. “Their heart remains devoid of hope. This way leads them very deep
into God, for their great despair leads them above all the ramparts and through
all the passageways, and into all places where the truth is” (Hadewych, Letters). Ergo the supreme meaning and
nonsense of Red’s final unjoking joke: I
am your God now. The truth is the truth—whatever that is.

“Doing and laughing, machen/lachen, doing evil and laughing
at evil, making each other laugh about evil. Amongst friends. Not laughing evil
away, but making ourselves laugh at evil. Amongst friends” (Derrida). Like Red’s
becoming like the monsters he fights, the simple genius of Mandy’s laughter is
seen in its own shadowiness, in its flame-like oscillation between the vertical
and the horizontal, between liberating joy and confined, monstrous spite. Laughing
in the face of evil means laughing inside evil, passing though one’s own evil [laugh].
This is the meaning of the imaginal merging of Mandy’s and Jeremiah’s faces from
the perspective of Mandy’s gaze.

“And what is laughter but
a flashing of the soul, that is, a light appearing externally as it is within”
(Dante, Convivio). One does not laugh
at evil without laughing at oneself. One does not laugh at oneself without
laughing at evil. “This is the sign of the spirit of truth: to realize that God’s
being is total love and to acknowledge oneself as total hate” (Angela of Foligno,
Memorial). Otherwise there is no true
laughter, just another cruel twisted smile. The joke is there is no joke, the
evil is there is no evil—what an evil joke! Now there is really something to
laugh at after all, to laugh . . . Yeah
it’s pretty awesome.

Whim after all is a whim; and, by its very nature, it is such that “why—wherefore—when” can find no place in its nature. A whim may come at any moment; it may come now or after a few months or after years, and it may not come at all.